“This article was originally published on the LinkedIn of Kelli Richards and is published with permission.”

In April 2012, 90,000 people at the Coachella music festival watched Tupac Shakur take the stage alongside Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. The crowd went insane. The hashtag #tupachologram trended for three weeks. There was just one problem: Tupac had been dead for sixteen years.

What happened that night in the California desert was a signal flare — a glimpse of a future where talent, creativity, and legacy no longer end with death. Over the decade plus since then, the technology has only accelerated. Today, we are firmly in an era where the barrier between the living and the departed is being dissolved by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and digital production techniques that would have seemed miraculous (if not impossible) just a generation ago.

As business leaders, creators, and innovators, we need to understand what this means — not just for entertainment, but for brand legacy, intellectual property, the future of work, and the nature of talent itself.

Select Case Studies That Define the Era

Case Study 01 · Music

Tupac Shakur — Coachella, 2012

Murdered in 1996, Tupac returned to a live stage through a technique rooted in 19th-century theater: “Pepper’s Ghost”. Visual effects company Digital Domain spent four months constructing a photorealistic CGI likeness of the rapper, drawing on archival footage and photos to reconstruct his movements. The image was projected onto an angled Mylar foil on stage using AV Concepts’ proprietary IceMagic system — a 54,000-lumen projection that made the crowd forget, just for a moment, that they were watching light. The performance drew 15 million YouTube views in 48 hours. The project cost an estimated $100,000–$400,000 and required the blessing of Tupac’s estate. It was a defining moment that made the world take digital resurrection seriously.

Case Study 02 · Music

John Lennon & The Beatles — “Now and Then,” 2023

In 1994, Yoko Ono gave Paul McCartney a cassette tape labeled “For Paul.” On it: a lo-fi boombox recording of John Lennon — dead since 1980 — playing piano and singing a love song he’d never finished. The audio quality was so poor that two earlier attempts to complete the track were abandoned. Then Peter Jackson’s team, using machine learning to remix audio for the Beatles documentary Get Back, cracked the problem. The AI could be trained to recognize and isolate Lennon’s voice — separating it from the piano, the TV noise, the tape hiss. “There it was, John’s voice, crystal clear,” McCartney said. In November 2023, “Now and Then” was released as the Beatles’ final song. It debuted at number one on the UK singles chart. Lennon had been gone for 43 years. The technology gave him (and The Beatles as a group) one last performance.

Case Study 03 · Film

Val Kilmer — Top Gun: Maverick, 2022 (& As Deep as the Grave, 2026)

Val Kilmer’s throat cancer treatment left him unable to speak after 2014. When Top Gun: Maverick needed the return of his iconic character Iceman, the production turned to London-based AI company Sonantic. I published an article about this back then. Kilmer supplied hours of archival audio recordings. Sonantic’s engineers cleaned up the audio, divided it into segments paired with transcripts, and fed the data into a neural network — a “voice engine” that learned how to speak like Val Kilmer. The team generated more than 40 voice models before selecting the best one. The result: a single, deeply emotional line of dialogue that brought audiences to tears. Kilmer himself called it “an incredibly special gift.” The film earned over $1.4 billion at the box office. It was AI not as spectacle, but as humanity — technology in service of an artist’s ability to show up one last time; well almost!

We lost Kilmer (a favorite of mine) in 2025 after a lengthy battle with throat cancer. Prior to his passing he had been cast in another film, As Deep as the Grave, as yet unreleased, but in the end he was too sick to shoot his role. So filmmakers used generative AI to include him in the finished film, and they recently shared a trailer giving viewers a first look at the AI technology they used.

Case Study 04 · Film

James Dean — Finding Jack & Beyond

In 2019, Magic City Films announced they had secured the rights from James Dean’s estate to digitally resurrect the icon — dead since a car crash in 1955 at age 24 — for a Vietnam War drama called Finding Jack. His likeness would be constructed from photos and archival footage, projected over a live stand-in, with another actor providing his voice. The project was ultimately shelved, but the announcement set off a global debate about consent, legacy, and the commodification of the dead. The technology it pointed toward has only matured since, (especially AI) raising the question that now faces every estate, every studio, and every artist: what rights does a legacy have, and who controls them?

Case Study 05 · Film

Peter Cushing & Carrie Fisher — Star Wars, 2016

When Rogue One: A Star Wars Story was released in 2016, audiences were stunned to see Peter Cushing — who had died in 1994 — reprise his role as Grand Moff Tarkin through CGI reconstruction. That same franchise later incorporated archival footage of Carrie Fisher, who died that same year, into The Rise of Skywalker. These weren’t fringe experiments; they were mainstream blockbusters proving that death is no longer a casting constraint.

Death used to be the ultimate contract termination. Technology is rewriting the terms.

What the Technology Actually Is

Most people assume this is about holograms. It mostly isn’t. The Tupac “hologram” was actually a 19th-century stage illusion called Pepper’s Ghost — angled glass or Mylar reflecting a 2D image. What’s new is the CGI quality of that image, driven by the same visual effects pipelines that power Marvel movies.

Voice synthesis has moved even faster. A decade ago, creating a convincing synthetic voice required hundreds of hours of clean audio. Today, Sonantic (acquired by Spotify in 2022), and other companies like ElevenLabs, can produce high-quality voice models from a fraction of that data, using neural networks that learn the timbre, cadence, and emotional range of a speaker. Machine learning-based audio remixing — the technology that rescued Lennon’s voice — can now separate sounds from a single recording in ways that were physically impossible just years ago.

And full-body digital human technology — the frontier that James Dean pointed toward — is advancing rapidly, with companies like WorldwideXR building entire businesses around managing and monetizing the likenesses of deceased celebrities.

Ethical Fault Lines

This is not a technology story without a tension story. The resurrection of talent raises questions that business leaders, lawyers, ethicists, and artists are actively fighting over.

The case for:

Estates can preserve and extend legacies. Fans gain access to art that would otherwise be lost. Technology enables completion of unfinished work with estate blessing. Artists who lose physical capacity can continue their careers.

The case against:

The deceased cannot consent to uses of technology they never knew about (though obviously their estates are making these decisions). Digital resurrection risks turning artists into commodities. Authenticity questions undermine both the resurrection and the original legacy. It has the potential to displace living talent.

The SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023 placed AI likeness rights at center stage, with actors demanding protections against studios training AI on their performances without ongoing compensation. The legal and ethical infrastructure is still being built — and the technology is moving faster than the rule books can keep up.

What This Means for Business and Innovation Leaders

If you work in brand, IP, media, entertainment, tech, or talent management, this is not a distant trend. It is arriving now, and it warrants serious strategic thinking.

Brands are already exploring what it means to have a spokesperson whose legacy outlives them. Estates are wrestling with how to monetize digital rights responsibly. Tech companies are building the infrastructure for a market that barely existed five years ago. And the rest of us are asking a deeper question: when a voice, a face, and a performance can be reconstructed — what, exactly, is the irreplaceable thing?

The answer, perhaps, is the same thing it has always been. The moment of genuine creation. The original spark. Tupac writing his lyrics. Lennon sitting at a piano in his apartment. Kilmer inhabiting a character for the first time. Technology can extend, amplify, and resurrect the output — but it cannot manufacture the human origin. That remains the most valuable thing in any creative economy.

The bottom line

Technology is not replacing talent. It is refusing to let talent disappear. The question for every organization is whether you have a strategy for the intellectual property, the ethics, and the human relationships that make this technology meaningful rather than just impressive. The future belongs to those who think about legacy before it becomes urgent.

Kelli Richards is a lifelong native Silicon Valley innovator, leader and visionary; a long-time Apple exec mentored by Steve Jobs for decades. She works with some of the most innovative growth stage companies helping them to unlock the full vision of their founders and senior management teams as they continue to scale. providing continued support to c-suite management team leaders and clients on global growth strategy, key partnerships, and content and consumer initiatives. leveraging innovation and emerging technologies as well as new business models to work smarter, more efficiently, and to accelerate success.

Kelli has been called” a force multiplier” who combines more than 25 years of senior level business experience in tech innovation with her talent for bridging industry sectors, and connecting individuals and teams to their work in a way that liberates their untapped potential and accelerates growth. A trusted advisor to founders and innovators, she’s also a thought partner to senior leaders, family offices and creatives. Simply put, when someone has challenging expensive problems they can’t solve on their own, or they need fresh insights and are seeking new direction, possibilities or alternatives, they call Kelli.